Intro To 'vdir' Command In Linux

2023-06-13 - By Robert Elder

I use the 'vdir' command:

vdir

to do exactly the same thing as this 'ls' command:

/usr/bin/ls -l -b

And that's pretty much all there is to this command.

The '-l' Flag

The regular 'ls' command produces output like this:

ls

enough.c  gun.c       gzjoin.c  gzlog.h   README.examples  zpipe.c  zran.h
fitblk.c  gzappend.c  gzlog.c   gznorm.c  zlib_how.html    zran.c

And the '-l' flag causes entries to be listed in the long format:

ls -l

total 248
-rw-r--r-- 1 robert robert 24856 Aug 23  2022 enough.c
-rw-r--r-- 1 robert robert  8596 Aug 23  2022 fitblk.c
-rw-r--r-- 1 robert robert 25942 Aug 23  2022 gun.c
-rw-r--r-- 1 robert robert 16978 Aug 23  2022 gzappend.c
-rw-r--r-- 1 robert robert 14132 Aug 14  2012 gzjoin.c
-rw-r--r-- 1 robert robert 41541 May 26  2019 gzlog.c
-rw-r--r-- 1 robert robert  4558 Aug 23  2022 gzlog.h
-rw-r--r-- 1 robert robert 22182 Oct  7  2018 gznorm.c
-rw-r--r-- 1 robert robert  1970 Oct 14  2018 README.examples
-rw-r--r-- 1 robert robert 29824 Dec 11  2005 zlib_how.html
-rw-r--r-- 1 robert robert  6323 Dec 11  2005 zpipe.c
-rw-r--r-- 1 robert robert 18158 Aug 23  2022 zran.c
-rw-r--r-- 1 robert robert  2131 Oct 14  2018 zran.h

The '-b' Flag

The '-b' flag enables C style escaping for non-graphical characters. For example, if I create this file whos name contains non-graphical characters:

touch $(echo -e "escape-\x1B-escape.txt")

the plain 'ls' command shows the file name like this:

ls escape-^[-escape.txt

'escape-'$'\033''-escape.txt'

and the 'ls -b' command shows the file name like this:

ls -b escape-^[-escape.txt

escape-\033-escape.txt

Same Source & Documentation

If you do a comparison between the man pages for the 'ls' command and the 'vdir' command, you'll see that the only difference is that the word 'ls' has been replaced by the word 'vdir':

vim -d <(man ls) <(man vdir)

You can further verify the connection between these two commands by reviewing the source code for the 'ls' command, where a comment shows that the 'vdir' command as well as the 'dir' command are simply thin wrappers around the 'ls' command that are enabled using a global variable:

/*
   ...
   If ls_mode is LS_LONG_FORMAT,
   the long format is the default regardless of the
   type of output device.
   This is for the 'vdir' program.
   ...
*/

And that's why the 'vdir' command is my favourite Linux command.

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